


Pain—has an Element of Blank

by middlemarch



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-29 20:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8505079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Who visits Freddie.





	

Marnie came to visit most days and Freddie liked it. He wouldn’t have thought it, had really hardly spared a thought for her once they’d left the house-party and Hector spoke of her rarely, but she was his most constant visitor in hospital, and frankly, the best. The rest of them had trooped through with wet newspaper-wrapped flowers and gaily covered books, Randall and Lix, Hector, Isaac and Sissy and Sey, whom he’d managed a smile for, and Bel, of course Bel, but Marnie had glided in one afternoon and then had continued to come, every day, without fail, while everyone else lived a life outside a hospital room. She didn’t bring grapes, like Randall had, because it wasn’t 1921 and he wasn’t an invalid gentlewoman. She didn’t expect much conversation and she was very easy to be around, much the way Ruth would have been he supposed, her full skirt gracefully draped and her ankles were crossed neatly in her elegant court shoes; he could barely make them out but she was all of a piece in a way that Lix could be but Bel never was, despite her smart dresses and paste pins. He had an overall impression of Marnie like the Renoirs Camille had dismissed since his vision was still blurred. What he could see of the doctor’s expression had not been entirely reassuring. He’d tried to get Sey to linger, so he could ask him for something more specific than the trite “just be patient” the house officer had given him, but Sissy had been between them and he thought she’d intended it that way. He’d have had a dozen theories why before the beating but he could hardly form one now.

Bel had been the most desirable and most terrible visitor. She trembled and tried to conceal it and started to reach for him and then caught herself, her hand suddenly between them as if it belonged neither to her nor him. He’d thought of how often he’d missed taking her hand in his, nights alone in his narrow bed with the linens unchanged for weeks, and in the States, looking out windows, falling asleep with his neck cricked, half-broken when he woke up but it hurt less than knowing she’d not written back. She brought a Bond novel, _Casino Royale_ , but he couldn’t call her Moneypenny anymore and there was a moment when he thought she must be his own Vesper and he closed his eyes and wept. She’d been so distressed and he couldn’t comfort her, not when it hurt to touch her, to be touched and not to be, to wonder if she could still love him as broken as he was, as unsure and afraid. Cilenti—where was he? Could he come back? Some night when the nurses were busy talking, talking at the nursing station, nursing their cups of tea, would he come into the room and finish what he’d started? Freddie hadn’t thought he’d mind, the first few days he stayed awake only for a few minutes before the morphine sunk him again, oblivion was not so bad even if he missed the promised ambience of hashish and silken divans, but they’d started cutting back and he found he did want to live and he still wanted Bel even if he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t risk hearing pity and it hurt too much to try and move very much, to hold her hand in a way that would make her cry out, “Oh, Freddie!” and tell him everything hadn’t changed. He was dull and dreary and he’d never been that for her; he didn’t want to know if she couldn’t love him that way, not when he wasn’t sure what was left of his mind other than nightmare and plodding.

Marnie made no demands. She very occasionally asked a question but always so cleverly that he could make no response and it wouldn’t derail anything. She didn’t bring food every day, but she when she did, it was some little pastry that smelled homemade and yet exotic, the sort of thing Hector wouldn’t even notice but that he’d never had except for the time he spent at Ruth’s home. He’d been so hungry as a boy he couldn’t recall what he’d eaten in detail—nothing had ever satisfied him and he’d been scolded repeatedly for being uncouth or a glutton. He didn’t always finish what Marnie brought but she smiled regardless and he liked the taste of her custard on his lips, the faint hint of almond or lemon in the cream that was arresting. She was a better reader than Bel, which did surprise him. Bel read too quickly, stumbled and choked and kept looking at him from lowered eyes, waiting for the old Freddie to interrupt. So was he, to be honest, but old Freddie Lyon didn’t seem prepared to make an appearance. He couldn’t follow the story and Bel’s voice, so familiar in his ear from telephone calls and whispered, hissing condemnation, was too far away to be comforting. Perhaps if she could have squeezed in next to him in the bed… but it would have hurt and the prospect of the nurses was enough to put anyone off. Marnie had a lovely, cultured tone when she read, as proficient there as in every womanly grace. He’d thought she made a wonderful visitor but not much else and that Hector was not too bad to be bored by her until she started commenting on the books she read. He realized she was twice as smart as her husband, three times if you counted how well she disguised it. And then he thought, again, what a fool the man was in his waistcoasts and gaiters and wondered what deal he’d made with the devil to win Marnie and Bel, even if Bel had thought better of it and thrown him over and Marnie knew better and kept him.

He tried to apologize once, for being so dull, and she’d waved it off, pointing out that he didn’t ask her to come and that she really had nothing better to do since ITV had forced her off her show, “far more politely than the Goths, but with the same general attitude toward Rome, darling.” He could see Marnie in a toga, Caesar’s wife above suspicion, but just thinking the thought tired him and she must have noticed because that was when she picked up the Rumer Godden book she’d been reading earlier and the air was suddenly full of the smell of jute, what he imagined garam masala to be, heat and dust all a welcome change from the hospital’s chill hygiene. He closed his eyes and she murmured “that’s right, sleep if you like, she’ll be by later and the rest will do you good.” He struggled a little to understand her and he fell asleep just as he did, confident, at least in this, that she wouldn’t mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, I think we're all agreed we needed a Season 3 (and 4!) but we never got it so we'll have fan fiction. Here is a look at how things might have gone-- I think Marnie was a character that was much more appealing in Season 2 and was still showing us more and more. I also think it would have been interesting to see how Freddie recovered from his assault-- and that it's likely he would have sustained significant, persistent trauma.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson. Marie is reading Rumer Godden's The River.


End file.
